One of the biggest causes of business owners neglecting to blog about their business is not knowing what to write about. Coming up with the subject matter is behind a lot of blogger's block. So what are some guidelines for to...

How can you sell effectively online? And what are the key differences between selling online and offline? To find out, I spoke to Internet psychologist Graham Jones, who has spent the last 15 years analysing how consumer behaviour has adapted to the web. In his book Click.ology, he argues that companies have yet to adjust …

Engagement is an essential factor in gaining trust, influence and exposure. No one wants to talk to robots or react to business content when there is only automated messages to listen to and follow up with.

Customer engagement sustains interest, as well as developing the brand and it’s personality. Engagement provides a means for long-term customer conversion, extending the nurturing process to channels where community management is facilitated.

New customers are likely to become repeat customers in future when they are reengaged, or kept engaged, after the initial sales process is complete. Effective engagement can be considered as a foundation for building brand loyalty.

There are many other advantages to customer engagement – advantages that affect the bottom line of your business. Here are 5 ways that you can use engagement to boost online sales…

Social media can be the perfect medium for delivering effective customer service. But you have to know and understand what best practice is, as well as continually practice and develop your customer service skills.

When coming into contact with customers in social media, you need to be friendly and professional at all times. It’s easy to spot negative characteristics in online communication and behaviour, so be aware that anything bad that happens spreads like wildfire.

I’ve put together 12 tips to help improve your customer service practices using social media. It would be interesting to hear which customer service tips you think companies would find most important in the comments section.

1. Listen to Your Customers

Never jump to conclusions.

The best thing you can do in social media is listen to your customers, whether they have complaints, questions or praise for your business.

When you listen, people feel appreciated and value the time you spend interacting and participating in conversations.

2. Remain Calm at All Times

Things can quickly escalate in social media.

It’s up to you to remember that customers are usually annoyed for a reason and that most people want their reason to be heard. Don’t take anything personally or anger the situation trying to be clever.

People expect professionalism. One of the best customer service tips is to keep a cool head and remain focused at all times.

3. Be Active

Customers like to see that you’re really there and actively engaging with your audiences. While it’s fine to schedule some posts and activities, monitoring the social media landscape is important.

This is one of the customer service tips to especially take note of because opportunities are often missed otherwise. You lose the ability to rapidly respond to the changing online environment if you’re not active...

Have you ever grown a garden? It takes time, patience and can be a lot of work. I believe this is the same with a Social Media Strategy. If you want to grow your business online - establishing a solid foundation, being consistent with messaging and establishing a well though out plan of attack is a must.

When I was younger one of my chores every year was to help my mom grow a
garden in our yard. We grew everything from tomatoes to different kinds of
peppers. It was a process from the beginning to the end. Early in the
spring season, before planting any seeds, we first had to prepare the
ground. The next step was determining where each plant would go. This was
important because there were areas that received more sunlight than others
...

My blog on JCF has been updated almost every week this year. It’s been a hard slog and I recommend only taking on a weekly blog if you’re really into writing and find it easy to get topics down and onto paper. Discipline is important and a regular blog is a big task.

Of course with all that blogging comes a lot of cool content but also some really useful stats and data! Yay – DATA!

But it’s OK! Don’t leave now. I’ll explain it all in simple English rather than code only a geek could understand.

So here are the top 10 blogs from JCF this year and a link to read them.But more importantly, here are why they made the top ten and how you can use these insights to improve your own blogging or content creation. (I told you you’d learn something!)

Too often, businesses think they can leverage social media by simply thinking about it as a bolt-on to existing marketing efforts or by outsourcing it entirely as a single activity. This is part of the reason why a grey area still exists as to whether social media can produce an ROI for business.

Simply put, businesses still don’t understand how to leverage social media. Having this initial lack of understanding opens the doors to developing a whole series of management practices that just don’t get it.

If you get the foundations right, you’re already half way there.

It’s critical that a clear understanding of how to leverage social media is realised before any real investment is consumed. Would you start a business without knowing if it could work? Have you hired someone without understanding how their skill-set will benefit your business?

Is your business making a profit on its social media activity? If you’re like most, you’re probably not 100% sure. And if you are convinced it’s contributing to your bottom line, you’re probably unclear about just how much. This is terrible for your social media programme. If you can’t make the business case for it …

The holidays are here (according to Walmart anyway) and businesses are already thinking about and actually running contests! Contests are a great way to engage with your customers through the holidays and say "thanks". They are also an awesome way to grow your audience as you head into the new year.

I've managed and consulted on quite a few contests over the years. So, this year I put together an eBook on the 7 Steps to a Successful Facebook Contest. These are the things I've learned that make a contest really successful. I hope they help make your next Facebook Contest successful, too!﻿

Need Help With Your Facebook Contest? Find out what to do and what not to do in the "7 Steps to a Successful Facebook Contest". What type of Facebook contests you can run now. This has changed! Why your prize matters. How to build a contest that will deliver results.